Philosophy 219
Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts
Marx and Engels, The German Ideology and Manifesto of the
Communist Party
Karl Marx (1818-1883)
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Marx’s life spanned the bulk of
the 19th century.
Originally interested in the law,
he shifted his attention to
philosophy, in which he received
the doctorate.
He spent the bulk of his career as
a journalist, moving around
Europe as his political activities
and writings led to his expulsion
from a number of different cities
and countries.
The focus of his work was on
economics and politics.
Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of
1844
• Written in Paris, the manuscripts were a series of notes
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and reflections emerging out of Marx’s study of Adam
Smith, political history and the emerging communist
political movements.
Like Smith, Marx was profoundly influenced by the
emerging industrial revolution and the transformation it
was producing in the lives and conditions of people.
His starting point in our selection is the starting point of
the social contract theorists (and Smith): the individual
and their interests (typically understood in terms of
property).
Homo Faber
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Marx assumes a very different theory of human nature than that of his
predecessors.
In labor human beings make the material they work with part of themselves,
transforming nature into an extension of themselves.
Labor is thus a form of self-knowledge. You come to know yourself by
experiencing the results of your own labor. In experiencing the product of your
labor, you are aware of both it and yourself.
Writ large, this self-identification in objectification is history revealing himself to
us, not only through the material results of our work, but through all of our
creations: art, law, religion, technology, society itself. In all of these endeavors,
we externalize ourselves and in the process become more self-consciously
human.
Homo Faber and Private Property
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This helps us understand why Marx believes that the
traditional starting point of political economy is faulty.
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He thinks that the prevailing account of the nature of our social and
political lives (i.e., Social Contract Theory), assumes private property
as a social reality (think Locke), without understanding how and why
property has come to have the significance it does.
He insists that, “…we have to grasp the essential connection
between private property; greed, and the separation of labor,
capital and landed property…” (701c2).
What is this connection: estrangement or alienation.
The Pin Factory
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In order to help us understand how property functions in our present
social historical circumstances, Marx completely reconceives the
significance of an example that Smith uses: the pin factory.
It’s truth is that it assumes the standpoint of the capitalist, forgetting
the effects of the division of labor on the worker.
In the factory, the process of becoming self-consciously human by
way of externalization through labor has been undermined.
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“The worker becomes all the poorer the more wealth [s]he produces,
the more h[er] production increases in power and size” (702c1).
Estrangement Pt. 1
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This undermining takes four distinct forms:
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Product Alienation: because they have no stake in what they
produce, workers no longer experience the product of their work
as themselves. The product of their labor doesn't belong to them,
but to the capitalist. All the workers have are their wages.
2.
Self Alienation: because they do not organize their own
productive activity, the workers’ relationship to their work, the
actual activity they engage in, is now also one of alienation. They
experience it as an alienation from themselves. They no longer
express themselves in their work; they lose themselves in it.
Estrangement Pt. 2
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Species Alienation: By “species being,” Marx means our existence
as a human being, considered in the aspects in which it differs
from the existence of other animals. A unique character of human
beings is that they are capable of working to produce things that
aren't needed for survival (e.g. art, which is produced for the sake
of beauty). Working for wages is work that's necessary for survival
-- and so workers lose what's distinctively human about
themselves, becoming alienated from themselves as human
beings.
Social Alienation: because, as a result of the other three forms of
alienation, workers are all in competition with each other, they
are alienated from each other. Love and trust are replaced by
bargaining and exchange. Human beings cease to recognize in
each other their common human nature; they see others as
instruments for furthering their own egoistic interests.
Against Private Property
• Marx's assumption that humans are Homo Faber
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together with his analysis of the inevitable alienation
resulting from private ownership of the means of
production, serve as a basis from which Marx
criticizes private ownership of property.
Private property is not only the source of this
alienation, it is also the necessary consequence of
alienated labor, of the external relation of the
workers to nature and to themselves (706c2).
Implications
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Private property sets up a negative feedback situation. The
only property owned by workers is what they buy with their
wages, so they doesn't own anything that they’ve had a direct
hand in producing. However, the need for further possessions
generates the need for more wages, and thus more alienated
labor.
This results in increasing greed: "Man becomes ever poorer as
man, his need for money becomes ever greater if he wants to
overpower hostile being"
His strategy for curing alienation was radical: to eliminate
labor within the capitalist system, the wage system, and
private property, i.e., to institute communism.
Friedrich Engels (1820-1895)
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Like Marx, Engels was of
Prussian descent, but he spent
most of his life in the major
cities of Europe.
His first hand experience with
the productive forms of the
industrial revolution
radicalized him, and after
meeting Marx as young men in
Paris, they became friends and
partners.
The Ideology was one of the
first products of their
collaboration.
The German Ideology
• The GI was written in 1845, while Marx and Engels were
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both living in Brussels.
It’s theme is history, which Marx and Engels understand
as a product of human activity (historical materialism),
rather than thought (the “Ideology” of the title).
The proponents of this “ideology” are the Young
Hegelians, for whom, “Life is… determined by
consciousness.” In contrast, Marx and Engels are
attempting to demonstrate that, “consciousness [is
determined] by life” (710c1).
The Starting Point
• For M & E, the only adequate starting point for a
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concept of history is the actual, concrete existence of
living individuals.
What this means, as the account of human beings as
Homo Faber suggests, is that history starts with the
“material conditions determining their production,”
i.e., “both with what they produce and with how they
produce.”
This is true for individual history and that of nations,
which can be distinguished, one from the other on the
way in which labor is divided in them.
Division of Labor and Property
• As we’ve already seen in the Manuscripts, there is
an intimate connection between the division of
labor and property.
• In the Ideology, we get a developmental account
of this connection, from “tribal ownership”
through “communal” and “feudal” up to
(implicitly) the form that ownership takes in the
modern era: “capitalist.”
The Upshot
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The significance of this genealogy is to lay the groundwork for an account of
consciousness which grounds it in specific forms of material existence.
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What might be labeled “capitalist consciousness” is not a “natural” condition, but
the result of a certain ordering of material conditions, including the forms of work
specified and required by private ownership of the means of production.
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This “order” has the effect of limiting human ideas and understanding, in effect
blinding us to other possibilities.
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The point of this “ideology critique” is to open the possibility of recognizing other
forms of consciousness, “Communism differs from all previous movements in
that it overturns the basis of all earlier relations of production and intercourse,
and for the first time consciously treats all natural premises as the creatures of
hitherto existing men…”
The Manifesto of the Communist Party
• Written in 1845, the Manifesto was
commissioned by The Communist League as an
expression of their principles.
• Refusing what they consider to be the fiction of
the "state of nature" Marx and Engels start with
what they take to be the truly historical
foundation of society: class struggle.
The Engine of the Struggle
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While class struggle has been a constant in human history, M
and E believe that something new has happened.
The bourgeoisie (the urban middle class, the factory owners)
have driven the transformation of society from a traditional,
monarchical, and sectarian organization to the modern,
democratic and secular one we know today.
The secret of the bourgeoisie is its ability to force other social
forms to adopt its mode of production, with the result of the
increasing accumulation of capital in its hands.
The Secret
• The secret of the bourgeoisie is also its undoing.
• The accumulation of capital requires the formation of
a new class: the proletariat.
• The proletarian is a worker commodified. Their
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significance lies in their capacity to sell themselves,
in the form of their labor.
Their essence is thus alienation: they have value only
as objectified labor. It is their alienation which
defines their political significance: they are the
revolutionary class.
The Dissociation of Labor
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A capitalist economy is characterized by the dissociation of
labor (the act of producing) from the natural milieu of
production (property). The worker doesn't own the property,
the capitalist does.
This dissociation in turn brings about the dissociation of labor
and property from the accumulation of capital.
The conflict arises in that the worker and the capitalist have
different relationships to this dissociation. The worker, because
of their lack of resources, suffers from it; the capitalist,
because of their possession of resources, can actually benefit
from it.
A Necessary Antagonism
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This difference leads directly to an explanation of why
this struggle is necessarily antagonistic:
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The dissociation is fatal to the worker: because the worker cannot take advantage of
the opportunities offered by the dissociation they are reliant only on the wages of
the labor. In classical economic terms, the only necessary wage rate (and also the
one that most closely matches the interests of the capitalist) is subsistence wage —
“cattle-like existence;”
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This reliance means that the worker is unavoidably subject to the law of supply and
demand. As such they are just one more resource or commodity;
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Vagaries of the economy affect the worker much more significantly than the
capitalist. Both because the capitalist is more able to weather the storm, and also
because as a commodity, the worker is much more sensitive to market fluctuations
than profit, which the market is designed to protect.
What Should be Done?
• M &E's answer (as we already know): Abolition of
Private Property (721c1).
• The goal is not to deprive people of their ability to lay
claim to the public good, but rather to deny people
the ability to claim this good for their own (722c2).
• In order to achieve this end, specific (and likely
unpopular) means of redistribution are likely
necessary (cf. 725c1-2).